More than 100 people attended the launch of the Communist Tendency of Syriza. Among those present were cadres of SYRIZA and the SYRIZA youth, trade unionists and veterans of the Greek workers’ movement.

May Day has a long tradition in Austria stretching back to 1890 when the call of the First International to fight for the 8 hour day was eagerly taken up by the then recently unified workers movement. This year too international workers day was celebrated in hundreds of activities across the country.

Iceland has often been cited as a model of how to solve the economic crisis, being presented as an example of recovery without austerity. As we have pointed out before, this is far from the truth, as any person from Iceland will tell you. On Sunday, the left government was unceremoniously booted out. This is the price they pay for the austerity of the last four years.

Several public sector as signalled that they are willing to fight the Croke Park 2 deal. This could set in motion a domino effectof more unions voting for strike actions.

"Avgi" (The Dawn) is the official daily paper of the party of the Greek Left, SYRIZA. Its Sunday edition has a very wide circulation (the fifth largest in Greece). Yesterday, April 28, 2013, it published a full page interview with the editor of Marxist.com, Alan Woods. We provide here a full translation of the interview.

While Thatcher is laid to rest, the heirs of Thatcher continue to haunt us. This Tory-led “we are all Thatcherites now” Coalition is presiding over the biggest assault on working people for more than 80 years.

The outcome of the SIPTU ballot on Croke Park 2 means that the proposals cannot be ratified when the ICTU Public Services Committee meets. This a serious blow to the coalition, as the government’s “Plan B” across the board pay cuts backed up by legislation; would most likely provoke a huge wave of strike action and opposition.

Hungary has been in the news lately and while a fully fledged dictatorial regime is nowhere near established yet, the steps that Viktor Orbán’s FIDESZ (Alliance of Young Democrats) government had been taking for the last 3 years point in no other direction by concentrating more and more power in the hands of the executive and neutralising or weakening all the existing counterbalancing powers within the state and society. In other words we have been witnessing a prolonged shift towards authoritarian rule by Orbán, the legal framework of which is represented by a series of constitutional “reforms” aimed at entrenching FIDESZ into power.

Things are going from bad to worse as the British economy heads for another downgrade by the credit agency Fitch. This is a direct reflection of the continuing deterioration of the public finances as the economy stagnates, tax revenues fall and borrowing rises.

In the five years since the global financial crisis first exploded, life has been hard for Britain’s unemployed and working poor. The growing ranks of the unemployed have had their already insufficient benefits cut, disabled people have found themselves subject to demeaning and invasive work capability assessments, and low-paid workers have seen real-term wage cuts, attacks on pensions and employment rights slowly stripped away. All the while the cost of the basic necessities of life continues to soar, leaving millions of people struggling simply to get by. Yet, as bad as this might be, there is worse still to come.

The former model country among the successor states of the former Yugoslavia now finds itself in a deep social crisis. For months the country has been shaken by a protest movement, which has oriented itself “against the system”. The following article by Goran Musić and Emanuel Tomaselli gives an insight into the background and perspectives of this movement.

Since the death of Margaret Thatcher last week the British Establishment have been revelling in their past. In a similar manner to the death of Princess Diana, the Royal Wedding and the Olympics, they believe that this event could serve as another circus to distract working class people from their problems. We would all come together as one nation and forget our class differences. This has been a serious miscalculation.

Len McCluskey, the General Secretary of UNITE, the largest union in Britain, has been re-elected. He received 144,000 votes while his only opponent in the election, Jerry Hicks, received nearly 80,000 votes. Over the course of the last few years McClusky has been moving to the left, putting such issues as reclaiming the Labour Party, nationalisation of the banks, the crisis of capitalismand the question of a ...

The recent ruling by the Portuguese Constitutional Court that four of the austerity measures in the government’s 2013 budget are unconstitutional is a major blow to the Portuguese ruling class. However, without the organisation of working people in defence of their rights, this ruling could mark a wave of devastating new attacks on ordinary Portuguese people. While we can celebrate the working class victory in the courts, we must realise that if the workers are to ultimately win the legal battle they, not the capitalist class, must be the ones making the laws.

The death of Margaret Thatcher has provoked sickening images of odious politicians praising her role in British politics. She put the “Great” back into “Great Britain”, it is claimed. On the other hand there were public celebrations in some parts of Britain (and private celebrations all over Britain) and public expressions of joy in working class nationalist districts in Belfast and Derry.